LANDSCAPE THERAPY

Creating artwork has always been my way of learning about things I knew very little about.

Over the past few years I have completed a series of personal projects on people’s lives that echo horrific experiences and struggles in the world today and in the past. They include WW2 veterans, Holocaust survivors and the day to day life of todays refugees. Art became the medium for connection between me and the people who were subjects of my portraiture, many of them hadn’t told their stories in almost 70 years. However, when I had the honour and privilege to meet and drawing these people and worked to record their stories through art, it was extraordinarily emotional for me as a young person. In turn I found myself seeking another way to cope with these challenges.

Here is where I found landscapes. The juxtaposition between the sentimental detail of portraiture and the neutrality of nature within landscape was fundamental to my well-being as an artist. Nature provides a form of sanctuary that we are all familiar with, connecting the physical with the emotive, and allowing us to pour our own frustrations and guilt whilst reaping positive transformative effects from the life around us.

Especially when so much death and so many atrocities exist in the world and there are so many people who can take their pain and grow with it and from it, we are also reminded of the restorative, healing aspects of nature which will grow in spite of both natural and man-made disasters, interactive with the ever-changing world around.

The artwork you see under this are those created in situ during my travels to use as a form of therapy for myself. Who knows maybe a viewer may even see some of the stories I have heard emerge through my depictions of the landscapes.